Vaccine hesitancy is variable across individuals and contexts. Theoretical work suggests that group membership should differentially affect attitudes and behavior related to COVID‐19 vaccines, as individuals draw on their identities and experiences relevant to their social groups to deal with uncertainty concerning the vaccines. The present work uses longitudinal survey data to explore how identity predicted vaccination attitudes in the U.S. before COVID‐19 vaccines were widely available and which role‐based or contextual variables influenced early vaccination decisions. We replicate these patterns in hesitancy with a larger and more racially diverse sample and identify whether encouragement from people with shared identities was important when participants made the decision to be vaccinated. Before the vaccines were widely available, higher SES predicted less hesitancy toward the COVID‐19 vaccines, while being Black and/or having more conservative political orientation predicted more hesitancy. More conservative political orientation was a predictor of vaccine hesitancy across racial identities. While rationale for mistrust may vary by identity, vaccine trust is a significant predictor of early vaccination, and it is influenced by local norms surrounding the COVID‐19 vaccines. Encouragement from shared group members was more important for women, liberal individuals, and younger individuals in making the decision to be vaccinated.
Human sociality is governed by two types of social norms: injunctive norms, which prescribe what people ought to do, and descriptive norms, which reflect what people actually do. The process by which these norms emerge and their causal influences on cooperative behavior over time are not well understood. Here, we study these questions through social norms influencing mask wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Leveraging 2 years of data from the United States (18 time points; n = 915), we tracked mask wearing and perceived injunctive and descriptive mask wearing norms as the pandemic unfolded. Longitudinal trends suggested that norms and behavior were tightly coupled, changing quickly in response to public health recommendations. In addition, longitudinal modeling revealed that descriptive norms caused future increases in mask wearing across multiple waves of data collection. These cross-lagged causal effects of descriptive norms were large, even after controlling for non-social beliefs and demographic variables. Injunctive norms, by contrast, had less frequent and generally weaker causal effects on future mask wearing. During uncertain times, cooperative behavior is more strongly driven by what others are actually doing, rather than what others think ought to be done.
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